Textual Vehicles - The Automobile in American Literature (Hardcover)

Examines an American icon

"Textual Vehicles" explores the position of the automobile in the mythologies of American literature through an analysis of the works of Sinclair, Lewis, Booth Tarkington, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Upton Sinclair, John Steinbeck, Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, Flannery O'Connor, John Updike, Arna Bontemps, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, E. L. Doctorow, Harry Crews, John Dos Passos, and Joy Williams. The study also addresses the ways in which race, gender, and place have affected writer's perceptions and imagination of the car.

Charts the development of a myth

The automobile unites the American fundamental ideologies of freedom and movement -- auto-mobility. The book begins with an examination of auto-mobility in literature prior to the invention of the car, and traces the evolution, through Lewis' novels in particular, of the automobile from romantic to satirical object. By the 1930s, the car had become essential to most Americans, such as Steinbeck's Joads, and had transfigured rural America, as evidenced by the works of Caldwell and Faulkner. During this period, the car attained increasingly complex literary signification -- the center of an intricate dialectic of attraction and repulsion. The mythical prominence assumed by the automobile after World War II was exemplified by Kerouac's On the Road. Updike's Rabbit novels chronicle the transformation of the image of the car to one of polluter and murderer in the wake of the social upheaval of the 1960s and the oil crisis of the 1970s.

The automobile as paradox

At the close of the century the car occupies an ambiguous and complex position in American culture, and literary responses tothe automobile have never been so multifarious. Harry Crews' Car and Joy Williams' Escapes exemplify the paradoxical role the automobile assumes in our present lives.